New Year Covar Analysis

The second of two newly defined New Year analyses based on examining the
data for previous years looks at the epoch average of the smoothed Covar
statistic. This is almost exactly the same as the smoothed variance
analysis used previously. Again we used a
"data-mining" assessment
of seven years of data around the New Year transition
to develop a new hypothesis to test on future data.
This showed that a good choice would be the same 13 timezones as used in
the Devvar-Netvar analysis, with the epochs defined as in previous
years, namely the 10 minutes centered on midnight, and a smoothing
window of 4 minutes, as before.
The statistic is also the same as previously used. A permutation analysis
(10,000 permutations) provides a distribution for the result of
multiplying the magnitude of the deviation at smoothed curve minimum
times its proximity to midnight. The min*prox measure for this year is
compared to the distribution.

For 2006, the resulting Z-score is 0.880, with p=0.189. This positive
outcome is in line with the average Z over the previous seven years.
A graphic version will be added here when available.